SUVs sind Killer-Maschinen
Each year cars kill roughly 40,000 people in America—and not just because it is a big place where people love to drive. The country’s roads are nearly twice as dangerous per mile driven as those in the rest of the rich world. Deaths there involving cars have increased over the past decade, despite the introduction of technology meant to make driving safer
Weight is to blame. Using data for 7.5m crashes in 14 American states in 2013-23, we found that for every 10,000 crashes the heaviest vehicles kill 37 people in the other car, compared with 5.7 for cars of a median weight and just 2.6 for the lightest.
The situation is getting worse.
In 2023, 31% of new cars in America weighed over 5,000lb (2.27 tonnes), compared with 22% in 2018. The number of pedestrians killed by cars has almost doubled since 2010. Although a typical car is 25% lighter in Europe and 40% lighter in Japan, electrification will add weight there too, exacerbating the gap between the heaviest vehicles and the lightest.
The Ford F-150 Lightning weighs around 40% more than its petrol-engine cousin, because of the battery that moves all those lithium ions from cathode to anode.
In 2022 France introduced a surcharge on new vehicles of €10 ($11) per kg over 1,800kg (4,000lb). In 2023 Norway began taxing car buyers at a rate of NKr12.50 ($1.17) per kg over 500kg.
Driving in Mississippi is four times as dangerous as in Massachusetts. In both cases the design of roads explains much of the difference.
It may seem arcane, but the lack of roundabouts in suburban and rural America is a big cause of deaths. Replacing intersections would save thousands of lives a year. The spread of stroads, four-lane highways that sit next to shopping malls, mixing pedestrians and cars turning out into traffic with heavy vehicles travelling at 50mph, is dangerous too. American highway engineers tend to associate wide lanes with safety. In fact, space encourages people to drive faster.
Because the energy—and hence destructive power—of a moving vehicle rises with the square of its velocity, finding ways to limit speed has an outsize effect. A good start would be to enforce the laws on speed limits that actually exist. Instead, plenty of American states ban speed cameras.